The scariest animal,

the most predatory and destructive
is  >>>

Snowmen

It is a pity that the young
and the striving
are unaware of the drifts of the dead.

It is a well-concealed fact

that the Cell (or Mobile) Phone
was invented by a certain
Dr Mesmer and marketed by
his Big Brother.

Sold for Half a Million

 

A drop in the ocean of tears

Five minutes after the first
and so-far only time a young man
has offered me (a foreigner)
a seat on public transport,
I went on an Alms-Spree
in the ghastly Gare du Nord
(yes, I was in Gay Paree)
and passed on all my considerable
change, and a note,
to beggars in the corridors
whose beauty took me by the throat.

Some well-intentioned people

try to save us from ourselves
- but there is no saving those
whose egos can be mellowed only
by extreme religious practice.

I wonder why

this book by Albert Cossery,




a fine Egyptian exile who wrote in French,
which was Received on Feb 12 2012 by the Ballard Branch
of Seattle Public Library, was sold to me
in Northern Ireland in December of that year,
marked 'No Longer Property of Seattle Public Library'.

The translation is excellent.  It must have been a gift
to Seattle Public Library (Ballard Branch)
which was then passed on to a secondhand-bookstore.
Maybe they already had a copy - and one copy
of a sardonic novella was enough within their many walls.

(Public Libraries in France do not accept donations.
I know because I wanted to present the local médiathèque
with a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells.)

Better to donate a book to a dealer than to a library !
Here are some bons mots  from that last book by Albert Cossery:

‘A diploma is a certain step to slavery.’

‘True immorality: stealing without risk.’

'One always learns something from rubbing shoulders with infamy.'

When a plane crashes

subsequent flights
and airplanes
become safer.

When a bank crashes
the banking system
remains pretty well the same.

Thus air-passengers are privileged,
even if they are assumed to be
and treated as would-be terrorists.

To those who, like me, delude themselves

that they are speaking Truth to Power,
whether to schoolteacher or to pope:

Truth never had a future,
for lies are minions of Hope.

Through a blog darkly

I like and link to what Jindra wrote. >>

Victorian philanthropists

were much involved in distinguishing
the deserving from the undeserving
poor.

But there are only undeserving rich
- even if they have 'risen' through aspiration
and sheer application
from the bottom of the
pool.

Perhaps

only totalitarians
can be happy
in an urban culture
- and nihilists
in  rustic solitude.

The advance

of 'political homosexuality'
and the decline of tobacco-smoking
seem to be coeval.  And where smoking
is not restricted (i.e. outside Europe and North America),
and the tobacco companies target the young,
anti-homosexuality laws are strong. 

This may not be coincidental.

Who would organise an Asexual Contentment Parade
(definitely not a march) ?
Though there are nearly as many 'asexuals'
as 'homosexuals', they are very, very quiet.
No-one would turn up.

Pride is for the arrogant.

A glimpse into the Future.

The Pædophile Wine Society

A CONSOMMER DANS SA JEUNESSE (2 ANS)

The French are especially, lamentably
ageist where wines are concerned -
due to the fatal, world-wide American Influence.

- brought to you from WickefreeDia the site which knows
that the forbidden must be discussed.

Democracy returns to Russia*

All but one member of the Russian Duma
voted to limit 'homosexual propaganda'.
Writing as an ex-homo, founder of
Anomalous Anonymous, and would-be
organiser of Pipe-smokers' Pride
I welcome a bit of Russian sanity.

The whole point of homosexuality
is that it's a deviation from 'normality'.

*Even if fomented (in this instance)  by the Orthodox Hierarchy.

More Good News

for wolves.

The Beautiful Game

The Poetry of Silence
           versus
The Silence of Poetry

Parlez-vous franglais ?

The gargantuan, gargouillesque man
with perfectly-fitted dentures
sitting opposite me
(First Class) on the TGV*
wore a jacket proclaiming
COMBAT OF NORTH POLE.
EXPLORING ADVENTURE!

*Train à Grande Vitesse, or high-speed French train,
on which, on this occasion, first-class seats were only
three euros more expensive than second-class.
(The Toulouse-Paris journey via Bordeaux
cost only €32 and lasted 5½ hours.)

The myopia of modern medicine

The Commission
of the European Union
has licensed a vaccine
which will prevent
the death of
ten children a year
in Britain.

It's not the Widening Gyre

that prevents the falcon
from seeing the falconer -
but the fact that he is being fucked
by someone in the byre.

(with apologies to Ireland's
only great poet)

from Petronius

"I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumæ, and when the young men asked her what she herself most desired [assuming Sibyls were victims of desire], she answered, “I want to die.” - ΑΠΟΘΑΝΕΙΝ ΘΕΛΩ
—Petronius, Satyricon

The Sibyl of Cumæ was the most famous of the old prophetesses. 
It was she who guided Æneas through Hades in Virgil's Æneid, because Cumæ is in Italy, not Greece.

She had been granted immortality by Apollo
(whose own oracle at Delphi proclaimed the famous words Γνῶθι σεαυτόν),
but because she forgot to ask the god for perpetual youth,
she shrank into withered old age and (according to Pausanias) her authority declined.

How many millions of humans have echoed her undying wish ?

When you are a little bit deaf

civilised
sounds very like
syphilised.

Rare are those
who could be
sybilised.

Many abstract nouns

have no more substance
than Facebook friends
- and as many identities.
One such virtuality
is justice.

My most serious childhood illness

was school.
I ran away from it.
Now, for almost everyone,
it has become
(along with parenthood)
the unconquerable cancer
of the spirit.

I love Cuttlefish !

This is my friend Mabel.

Robots

In the nineteen-sixties
millions were led to believe
that, forty years on, much work
would be done by robots.

And so it came to pass.
But the robots are human
worshippers of the Great God Status.

During my lifetime

the sub-Darwinian
insidious idea
of living, of life itself
as a career
has taken people over
almost everywhere.

From now on, people of the world,
endowed by Twitter, Facebook
(and whatever follows on)
with two or twelve identities
(child, husband, friend, lover, wife)
will also have several careers
- but nothing I would call a life.

The News and Entertainment Industries

aka The Media
are controlled by people
who have the cold and clear-eyed
sensibility of a foetus in formaldehyde.

Being as thin

as I was at sixteen,
my size in underpants [Am.: shorts]
is SMALL.

Teenagers now, methinks,
have exaggerated cocks
or inflated balls.

All you need to know about the Western mind-set.

Today
President Obama promised
in his re-inauguration speech
to FIGHT
climate change.

God help Gaia ! - is he going
a-tilting at windmills ?

Souvenir de Bordeaux

On one of my rare visits
to a restaurant
I observed (without being rude)
two guys (certainly a couple)
devoting more attention
to their cell-phones
than each other, or the food.

As one of them distractedly
poked his fish-farmed trout
he gave me food for thought -
and brought to mind a line by
William Carlos Williams:
'If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.' 

Quote of the day

(from BBC Radio 4, 09.00 hours)

'Behemoth is the word.  Music and Industry
are two words which should never be combined.'

- Barb Jungr

Today's Fascinating Fact :

Comets

Comet Lovejoy

are the tiny trashcans
of the cosmos.

Syria fell off the world this week

because a bunch of greedy, grotesquely-overpaid,
air-conditioned, non-African, oil-industry employees
were taken hostage in the Sahara.
Had it been just a bunch of Algerians
we would have heard little.
But some 'Britons' died
in what the British Prime Minister
called an appalling act of terrorism.

Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands
of non-'Britons' die every hour in serious
conflicts elsewhere in Africa, in Afghanistan
and in  Syria's ghastly civil war.

Correcting Jindra

(by removing one word -
though it's just an excuse
to post a re-blog) :-

'If I look carefully
I can find problems in all people.
And that gives me great hope.'

Where but in Belfast

city of my not-so-pleasant conception
would it take 'studies'
to reveal that crabs and other crustaceans
feel pain ?

Two thousand years of 'science'
have not been in vain.

A cuttlefish.

An offering to Janus

Since Charles Darwin's time
we have known that life  
"as we know it"
is - or is defined by - struggle.

So it's really not worth living by
judgmental beings who haven't the energy
to struggle and strive.
 
Thus life ("as we know it")
can repudiate itself.
Which may explain our two-mindedness
and reluctance towards suicide.

People put labels

on other people
to make them nothing.

I'm told that my blogs are too serious & 'heavy'.

So I hope that this little
'interface graphic'
will increase my 'humour traffic'
.

'Light'

often means
TOO HEAVY TO BEAR.
(Just letting you know
to make you aware...)

Snow-blindness

It's snowing !
Snow-crystals are the nearest
that many folk will get
to the Milk of Human Kindness.

Surprise, surprise !

While welfare benefits and services all over Europe
and North America are being cut, and permanently eroded,
the luxury market is booming.
Rolls-Royce, having enjoyed its highest-ever sales,
is expanding its production.
The rich (and their political puppets)
will ensure that democracy fails.

Karel Čapek wrote:

'If dogs could talk, 
perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with  people.'

(Dashenka, or the Life of a Puppy,1933)

But of course if they could talk, they would just be cynocephaloi,
not dogs at all.

On the other hand,
they DO talk, but not in any way we can be bothered to try and interpret.
And they often understand us better than we understand ourselves.
So, language is by no means such a wonderful thing
as we lead ourselves to believe.

thankyou, Jindra!

A wheelie-bin in Norfolk this morning.

© Stuart Maddock MMXIII

After "nine-eleven"

we learned that
only Americans have feelings.
Everyone else
has a sense of proportion.

Fun

is most fun with no clothes on.
Sexy
is sexiest with lots of laughter.

This is just a simple ingredient
of the good life.

Henri Bergson wrote:

Le langage pétrifie la vie intérieure.

But how can we know whether or not
language freezes consciousness
when language is the only tool
that we're allowed to have ?

Goals

are the abstractions
by which people ruin
the lives of others -
and themselves.

The TS Eliot Memorial Poetry Prize

was awarded this year also
to a writer of chopped-up
sentimental prose.
'And so it goes.'

read a truly nauseating example here

from the Dissident Websites' Weekly Wine-blog

A good host
should always remove the cork
quickly from the corkscrew -
because one never knows when one might need
some defence against a guest.

A blatant lie could "save the planet"

'Eating meat
will shrink your willy.
Eating greens
will make it grow.'

This may be the only way to overcome
the invincible weakness
of idiot-ego.

Today’s interesting fact:

over half of the (tiny) number of cases of parental sexual abuse
are by mothers, and always on sons.

But what do they mean by ‘abuse’ ?
Jewish and other Middle Eastern mothers traditionally
masturbated male babies to get them to sleep.
Presumably many since we invented Time have done so, too.

(Does this lie behind the myth of Eve and the Serpent ?)

(Will such mothers in future be placed in some sort of zoo ?)

[a sock-puppet comment on pædophilia]                                    

What is 'against us'

is not Nature, nor the Devil
- but what we create:
private property.

my next incarnation

A not-very-good Sort-of-poem

 for Eric Chaet


The real scandal of the education systems
is that the rejects, the overlooked, and defensive self-excluders
don't learn how to budget, how to eat well and cheaply,
don't even learn how to entertain themselves
(movie audiences and the video-game market might decrease),
and so they end up gambling, drinking, escaping from grindingly-sad
boredom, seeking some kind of brief respite, release
by dodgy drugs, 'committing'  petty crimes...
or simply going mad.

from the Dissident Websites Weekly Wine-blog

A first-glass wine
is very different from a
first-class wine.

@ very common thing for which there is no word!

@lmost no @nglophones know
what an @rrobase is,
because there is no word for it in English.
and we are too @pathetic to borrow it
(as we have done to thousands of others)
from French.

A January sort--of-poem

Persimmons and medlars
should be eaten after they have frozen.
Pears are best when their flesh
starts to darken.
Many things in life are better than they seem.
I like bananas with black skins
and melting inside:
delicious with home-soured cream.

If you can't sell yourself

or be marketed
you're nothing.
in the grotesque
capitalist micro-universe
of self-monitoring robots.

There are many kinds of lie.

There are many kinds of silence,
some of them beautiful,
and in silence also there can be dishonesty.

Today's incredible statistic

comes from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers:
half of the food grown in and imported to Europe and North America
is thrown away. 
30% of food grown there is rejected because of its appearance. 
Elsewhere, half is lost by inept storage, poor infrastructure, hygiene etc.

Agriculture (by the Most Intelligent Species)
on a grotesquely-overpopulated planet
is simply succession of catastrophes.

An ordinary joe or josephine might think

that our culture is fuelled by oil.
No, sister!  No, brother :
it is fuelled by the stress
that humans put upon each other,
as on the atmosphere, the oceans and the soil.

It might be nice

to return to life
with demons, spirits, hobgoblins, gods
- when most people were not
existential frauds.

Maybe I should have celebrated Christmas this year...

      Her Britannic Majesty

...in Catalonia.

Another reason why the US hates China, its chief creditor.

Not a rant, just a statement of facts (?)

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US (to whom even we Irish are THEM) has sent forces
(from dozens to hundreds of thousands of 'service personnel') openly into at least 10 different countries (including tiny islands) across the world.

America has 'military missions', often with 'sovereign' (i.e. beyond the law of the country they are in) 'facilities' (bases for rockets, missiles, drones, interrogation etc), in over 100 countries - China in none, not even in North Korea.

At least 10 other countries have had more-or-less secret military interventions
to instigate, support, or counter coups d'état.

The US has also funded and trained 'insurgents' all over the world.

China, on the other hand, has merely trained insurgents from some of its neighbours (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia).  It has not invaded any neighbouring country other than Tibet (which Britain once hoped to annexe along with Afghanistan). Its inevitable annexation of Tibet continues to raise American outcry.

And so, by the common process known to psychologists as projection, the voters of the US (world's largest manufacturer of means-of-murder and pornography) not only hate China, but are afraid of her, too.   Another reason, of course, is that the Union is founded on the need for a Big Enemy -
and really needs a Big Enema.

[read source]

虚無僧 - Komuso

The only honest priest
is a priest of nothingness
in natural wilderness.

Consistency of thought

is a totalitarian trait,
a form of fascism
which the male mind adores.

Their backs are even bigger than their fronts.

Just as each of us tends to listen to a liar in polite silence,
so as population-masses we let politicians
keep on saying that they are doing a decent job,
let police declare that they are honest and law-abiding,
and allow armies to deny
that they are expensively well-trained gangs of thugs.

People who take themselves seriously

can be very painful.

Isn't it depressing

that the women who are most admired
even by other women
are those who have 'manly',
usually forceful, qualities' ?

Landfillharmonic, Paraguay.

Competitiveness

may contribute to inventiveness,
but is the enemy of beauty and of art.

On the few occasions that I go to a supermarket

I am amazed by how few people take their card or money out
(often from the bottom of a bag) before they're presented with the bill.
Is it really a surprise for them to have to pay at a check-out till ?

Russia has given Gérard Depardieu a passport

to avoid high French taxes on the super-rich
(who cannot even manage a sensible diet)..
France should retaliate by offering asylum
if not nationality to Pussy Riot.

Acronyms

When I first came across NSFW
on blogs and websites
I thought it meant Not Suitable for Women.
Then I realised that the W stood for work[ing environment]
- something I have never experienced.

I should put something similar on this blog:
NSFC [ollaborators]
NSFN [ormals]
or even NSFCB...

Why would one NOT be hospitable to strangers ?

Inducement to hospitability by threat suggests a very sick society.

Gabriel García Márquez

(a writer I find unreadable)
said that everyone has three selves:
public, private and secret.

I can locate only one,
and it is very public.
Is my personality denuded -
or am I dangerously deluded ?

Childhood, sex and sexuality

Much of the world
now seems to deny,
and certainly taboos,
childish sexuality.

Children are pushed into
a cage labelled INNOCENCE.
Then, even before puberty,
and just as they start to dump common-sense,
adult sexuality is dumped on them
when they're in no position to refuse.

Kephalology

Perseus and Medusa,
David and Goliath,
Judith and Holofernes,
Kali and her necklaces,
Salomé and Baptist-John
Grisly Celtic skulls of foes
and victims, on glistening red
poles, pecked at by crows :
what is so attractive about the severed head ?

Guillermo Pérez Villalta: Salomé

It is less damaging for almost everyone

to be a pervert,
rather than a convert - to almost anything.

The importance of a comma.

My New Year Resolution:
to do nothing,
better.

What's the way forward ?

he asked.
She replied:
There never was a forward,
except for predators,
such as demented warlords and landless roustabouts
calling themselves Christian soldiers marching into Palestine in the 11th century and thereafter. 
There's only swings and roundabouts.

Albert Cossery

wrote what might be the motto of this blog:

'I cannot write a single phrase which doesn't contain a certain measure of rebellion.'

                                                              link =>

Top Quotes from 2012

I laughed till I stopped.  (Monty Python)

The greatest of non-red Americans are black.
Two of the greatest of the great Americans are
Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.    
(Kim Jong-un, President-for-life of the People's Republic of North Korea)

I have better sex with food (assuming I have any)
than I have with my husband.  
(500,000,000 women)

Let's hope for fewer fathers in the coming year.
(The Unborn)

I have absolutely no idea why I exist. 
Nor why I have so many foreskins.
I have left such problems to Professor Higgs.
Now what did I do with that boson...? (God/All'ah/Ya'hweh)

What's with Respect for the Dead ?
If respect is genuine, it is for what is worthy of respect
- for example: interior integrity. (The Dreadful Great)

My brain gets in the way of my Inner Animal. (This Blogger)

Sometimes I feel my mind is like an unsafe neighbourhood.
So let's not go there. (Jindra Hrdliča)

The trouble with Americans and the Taliban is that they take themselves
far too seriously, and thus have an undeveloped sense of humour (USOH).
(re-blogged from His Serene Highness Pope Ozymandias I  via S. Hussain)

Spending Cuts

A town in England has closed all its Public Conveniences
thereby saving £25,000 ($40,000).
It is an offence in England to piss (let alone shit!) in public,
and a charge of Indecent Exposure could also be brought.
Thus is Public Welfare meanly turned to nought.